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What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century

The pragmatic approach

Chris Patten
Allen Lane, 459pp, £25,

Jonathan Sumption

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance.

It seems a bit early to be discussing how to survive the 21st century. After all, there are 92 years left in which to do it, years in which we can expect traditional verities to fall away, existing technologies to be transformed, and problems yet unheard of to supplant the imperative causes of our own day. Political pundits have always tended to extrapolate from both the problems and the solutions of their own time, and Chris Patten is no exception. Such works have a short shelf-life. Yet there is much more to his latest book than hand-wringing and soothsaying, and there are good reasons why even the most sceptical should read it.

One reason is that it contains one of the best analyses in print of where we are now. Globalisation, migration, climate change, water- and energy-shortage, terrorism and organised crime, nuclear proliferation, Third-World poverty, drugs and prostitution: there are sane accounts of all these much- debated problems, full of new information and perceptions, even if the overall picture is familiar enough. Patten casts a world-weary eye over international politics, a world in which the short-term horizons of all the main actors leaves him with little to analyse and less to admire.

Chris Patten is a traditional Tory with a Tory’s instinctive distrust of ideology. He is a pragmatic liberal paternalist, who believes in the beneficent power of the state. Of course, he is well aware of the tendency of all political power to overreach itself. But there is a touching faith in the power of consensus politics to protect us from the consequences. The same belief in collective solutions powers Patten’s faith in the European Community. It is a rather top-down view of the world, in which unguided humanity gets very little credit for initiative.